Mr Bunnsy Has An Adventure

The sharpest fictional book Pratchett wrote, and it is a picture book about a rabbit.

The setup is exact. The rats become intelligent overnight and inherit nothing — no history, no philosophy, no accumulated argument about how to live. What they have is one sugary children’s book found in a bin, in which animals wear waistcoats and settle disputes over tea. They cannot tell it is fiction. Nobody has explained the category to them. So they read it as reportage, and begin trying to build the society it describes.

Pratchett then refuses the easy ending in both directions. The book is not secretly true and it is not a cruel joke either. It is a bad, sentimental, inaccurate book that nonetheless gave a species the idea that something better than a rubbish heap was available — and the rats’ argument about whether to keep believing in it is the actual moral centre of the novel. Dangerous Beans is not stupid for believing. He is doing what belief is for.

File it beside the Septateuch. Both are books mistaken for descriptions of reality by readers who need them to be. One is enforced by an Inquisition and kills its own god; the other is a rabbit in trousers and builds a nation. The difference is not in the books.

On the readability rating. Short passages and the refrain are quoted directly, and the rats’ commentary on them is extensive.